To Wet a Widow's Eye

by WILLIAM L. COPITHORNE

WHILE living in Cuba several years ago, teaching a course in the history of English poetry at the summer session of the University of Havana, I was puzzled for a time by receiving through the mail each day an unsigned Spanish translation of an English poem. The taste of the translator was catholic, his subjects ranging from Shakespeare’s Tired with All These, for Restful Death I Cry, to Felicia Hemans’s The Child’s First Crief. I at first assumed that one of the students in the class was thus shyly manifesting his interest in poetry, or perhaps using Shakespeare to tell me that he found the course unbearably dull, but one of my Cuban friends, to whom I showed the poems, dismissed these theories with a peremptory wave of his hand. “It is a simple matter,”he said. “One of the girls in your class has fallen in love with you, and has chosen this method of expressing her feelings.”

I scoffed at such a possibility, and pointed out that the choice of poems they were all expressive of the misery of life - was hardly what a girl in love would make for such a purpose. My friend shrugged. “To the Cuban woman,” he said, “poetry is indistinguishable from the emotion of love. Ihe pessimistic tone of the poems doubtless expresses her suffering for a love that she feels is hopeless.”He smiled happily and patted me on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Amigo,” he said. “It is always a pleasure to be loved.”

Each day thereafter I eyed the students speculatively to see if some trace of self-consciousness would expose the translator. The class, which met each afternoon from Monday through Friday, was made up of about fifty men and women, all Cuban teachers of English, varying in age from twenty to sixty. With understandable apathy, for the summer was hot, they were complying with a Cuban law which required all public-school English teachers to attend the summer session of the University; and while, to my apprehensive eye, each of them looked capable of sending poetry anonymously through the mail, none appeared equal to the effort of translating an extracurricular poem a day. The poems kept coming, however, neatly transcribed in longhand. Sir John Davies’s poem, which ends,

narrowed the field, I trusted, to the men in the class, and Edgar Guest’s Lord, Make a Man Out of Me momentarily confirmed this impression. Emily Dickinson’s bleak little lyric, A Wife at Daybreak I Shall Be, threw me off the track again, and I got nowhere until a poem by one Mrs. David Porter, called Thou Hast Wounded the Spirit That Loved Thee, unnerved me to the point of giving the students an examination, in order to compare the handwriting on their papers with that of the poems I had been receiving.

This device proved successful, and I was somewhat relieved to find my friend’s theory refuted. Señor Guillermo Contreras, a middle-aged man with mournful brown eyes and a drooping mustache, who sat quietly and attentively each day in the front row, was unmistakably the translator. When I detained him after the next meeting of the class, he anticipated my question.

“You wish to know if I am the translator of the poems you have been receiving?” he asked sadly. I nodded and he heaved a deep sigh. “I must confess that I am,” he went on. “You see, Señor, I am very timid as a man, and even more timid as a translator of poetry, so I beg you to forgive me.” He tugged at his mustache and looked at me hopefully. “I sent my translations to you in the hope of obtaining your criticisms of them eventually. You liked them — no?”

I told him that I thought they were very good, and he nodded in sober agreement. “It is my hobby,” he said, “and you must understand why it is so important to me. All day long during the school year I sit in the classroom, listening to my students translate from their grammar books. ‘The pencil is red — el lápiz es rojo.’ ‘The table is green — la mesa es verde.’ ‘I drink the coffee, you drink the coffee, he, she, it drinks the coffee.’ And at night, when I go home, those sentences repeat themselves in my mind. ‘Where is the ink? The ink is on the table.’ ‘Do you like lemonade? No, I do not like lemonade.’ ” Señor Contreras breathed heavily, and his voice rose. “You understand, Señor, that I must find refuge from these sentences. To expel them from my mind I read and I translate your Shakespeare, your Milton, your Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” Trembling a little, he stopped and looked at me apologetically. “Forgive me, Señor,” he said, “but, as you see, poetry means very much to me. In the future, you may rest assured, I shall present my translations to you personally. I shall be grateful for your criticisms.”

I saw Señor Contreras frequently after that, for we lived in the same neighborhood, and we would often get the same bus to and from the University. His sources for translation, he informed me, were The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume entitled The Best Loved Poems of the American People, into both of which he dipped impartially. Of the two, he confessed that he found the American anthology more useful, in that the poems were grouped by subject matter under such headings as “Love and Friendship,” “Home and Mother,” “Animals,” and “Memory and Grief,” thus making it easier for him to pick a poem suiting his mood.

He no longer sent me his poems through the mail, bul I shortly had cause to repent my curiosity, and to wish that I had left things as they were, for he now chose to read the translations aloud to me in circumstances that I often found both inconvenient and embarrassing. As we would stand on the street corner, waiting for a bus after class, for example, he would draw a translation from his pocket and in a deep, resonant voice, and with appropriate gestures, would read it. His timidity, both as man and translator, had apparently vanished completely, for other people who were waiting for the bus would invariably cluster round and listen, and when he had finished he would bow gravely to them, obviously pleased by their murmurs of “Qué bonita! Qué bellísima!” Frequently two or three buses would pass us while we stood on the corner, for, no matter in what hurry I was, I could never bring myself to interrupt him in the midst of a long poem such as Lycidas, which would take him ten or fifteen minutes to read. If we got on the bus before he had read me his translation of the day, he would start it there, drawing the attention of the driver and the entire body of passengers, all of whom would listen appreciatively. One day our bus driver, intent on Señor Contreras’s translation of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, sped through a red light and was stopped by a policeman, who, when the cause was explained to him, detained the bus only for the length of time it took Señor Contreras to finish reading the Ode. “A very beautiful poem,” the policeman said, waving us on.

2

ON ONE particularly hot Friday afternoon, I let the class out early, and went with Señor Contreras— or Guillermo, as he had by now asked me to call him — to a near-by café. Over a café solo, he read me his translation for that day, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. When he had finished I ventured to ask him why he chose subjects so consistently melancholy in tone. He carefully replaced Dover Beach in his pocket and sighed. “As you have observed, Señor,” he said, “I am not only a timid man, but also a very melancholy man. I feel that I know you well enough to confide in you the cause of my melancholy.” He frowned, and spoke with an effort. “I suffer, in brief, from a love that I have not the courage to declare.”

He sipped his coffee meditatively before he continued.

“The object of my love is known to you. She is a student in your class in poetry—the Señora Migdalia Perez, a widow, next to whom I sit in the front row.”

I recalled Señora Perez as a short, stout, attractive woman, much given to the manipulation of a small black fan, and far less attentive to what I had to say about poetry than Señor Contreras was. Indeed, she had often annoyed me during class by distracting the men around her by her dexterous use of the fan. Guillermo, I gathered, had been more aware of her than he had appeared to be.

“My timidity,” he went on, “forbids me from making overtures, so I draw comfort from translating sad poems.”

“But you have no problem at all, Guillermo,” I said lightly. “Why not send her some of your translations?”

“Ah, no,” he said. “I fear it would be indelicate.”

“Not at all,” I replied, and I reminded him of Petrarch and Laura, and of Dante and Beatrice. “And even in England,” I added cheerfully, “you have the example of the Brownings.”

“Very true,” he said, brightening a little. “They would not be poems of my own composition, of course, but it may be just as well. A translation will not seem so bold, perhaps.” He thought hard for a minute, and then turned to me resolutely. “I shall do it,” he said, “and I shall let you choose the first poem for me to send her.”

I opened the anthology which we used in class, and came upon Shakespeare’s Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? “Here,” I said. “Here’s an excellent one.”

“Shall I compare thee, Señora Perez, a un día de verano?” mused Guillermo. “A very beautiful poem. You are convinced that it would not be indelicate?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Just be sure to sign your name.”

Since the class did not meet again until the following Monday afternoon, I had the week-end, before seeing Guillermo again, to ponder my impulsive advice. On Monday morning I was startled to get a poem through the mail, this time not in Guillermo’s handwriting. The paper was heavily perfumed, and the poem, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, in the original English, was signed with the initials “M.P.”

It took me a minute or two to suspect what had happened, and my suspicions were confirmed at the meeting of the class that afternoon. I looked hard at Señora Migdalia Perez, who glanced archly at me over her fan, then quickly covered her face, only to smile at me in a moment, the fan held coyly at her left ear. At the end of the class I drew Guillermo aside. “Look,” I said hoarsely. “Did you sign that poem you sent to Señora Perez?”

He shifted uneasily. “No, not exactly,” he said. “I thought it would be easier to wait a little while before I sign my full name to the poems I shall send her.” He looked me in the eye and added stoutly, “I did, however, sign my initials — G.C.”

“Do you realize, Guillermo,” I said, “that Señora Perez thinks I sent her that poem? My initials are W.C., but since my first name, ‘William,’ is ‘Guillermo’ in Spanish, she probably assumes that I’m using the Spanish form.”

Guillermo shook his head and spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “Then there is no hope for me,” he said ruefully. “It is you she loves.”

I gripped him by the shoulder. “Right now, Guillermo,” I said, “you are going to sit down, copy a poem, and, in my sight, sign it and mail it to the Señora Perez. You needn’t bother to translate it.”

Guillermo protested, but my anger must have impressed him, for he reluctantly complied. He chose Shelley’s Lore’s Philosophy, copied it from the anthology, and signed it. We then went to the University Post Office, where he put it in an envelope and mailed it to Señora Perez.

An access of timidity apparently prevented Guillermo from coming to class for the next two days. For my part, I was relieved to find that Señora Perez now regarded me indifferently over her fan. If anything, there was slight hostility in her expression, which I suppose would be natural under the circumstances. She spent most of her time in class casting reflective glances at the empty scat beside her.

I met Guillermo on the bus Thursday afternoon on the way to the University. He seemed very much excited as he took from his pocket and handed me a strongly perfumed paper, on which was copied Shakespeare’s sonnet

“Very appropriate,” I said. “Congratulations, Guillermo.”

Guillermo fidgeted on the bus all the way to the University, and once in the classroom he lowered himself nervously into the seat beside Señora Perez. She bowed graciously to him, and smiled at him over her fan. Neither of them, I observed, paid any attention to what I had to say about Wordsworth during the hour. At the end of the class, Señora Perez started talking earnestly to Guillermo, and for the first time I saw Guillermo smile.

I saw very little of Guillermo after that, for Señora Perez lived on the opposite side of town, and he began escorting her home. Now and again, however, I would meet him on the bus on the way to the University, and he would tell me that his suit was progressing admirably. He had lost his timidity, he said, when he had found that Señora Perez was a lover of poetry, too.

Shortly after I had returned to the States in September, I got a letter from Guillermo, telling me of his engagement to Señora Perez. In the same mail was a package containing a vellum-bound copybook in which Guillermo had written out all the poems he had translated during the summer. I was pleased to see that the later poems were not melancholy in tone. The last poem in the book did bother me a little, however. It was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Woman’s Shortcomings.